What can we do? Post # 1

The area that I feel is the most important to the success of a school when it comes to the implications of technology is the area of Leadership, Administration and Instructional Support. I feel that this area is so important because without leaders and administrators pushing a technology in school you easily can have a short fall in many different areas. The creation of a proper technology budget is the first thing that comes to mind, with out Administration support you my not receive the funding necessary to support, teacher staff development, student and teacher online training, distance learning, classroom technology, and all that comes with internet and web applications. I feel that the national trend in technology education is being pushed forward how ever with the recent budget cuts I can't help but see the first thing being cut is technology funding, and teacher resources. I seems that the leadership has looked passed a global education for our children in favor of spending on other resources. The state of Texas seems to be hit hard by the same leadership idea, I have already heard of several different district eliminating their whole technology staff, this seems to be a drastic measure but is this a new trend in our school or just a difficult choice by Administrator in those districts. Locally the leaderships decision have had a big effect as well, we seem to have a drastic cut in resources such as DVDs , lab tops, and software. This funding is the key area in the Leadership, Administration, and instructional Support area, all the planning, verbal support, and collaboration will do you no good if the budget is not there to support technology. I think that one way we can help in this area is to create digital libraries at our schools, every year I see hundreds of new books being delivered to our library and every year I see those same books collecting dust, our library at must will have three students in it at a time. If our state or local leadership would fund a digital library with digital readers, lab tops and larger computer labs it will save on future spending. The start up cost would be high, but the up keep would be low, you can access data bases with thousands of free and cheap online and down loadable books. Administration would have to take part in collaboration with different subject to build a core set of books, they would need to create online staff development so teacher could instruct student on how to access and use this new technology, and there would need to be a committee formed to plan the usage of this technology, all things that fall into the Leadership, Administration Instructional Support StaR chart report.